Why collegiality matters in academia

Collegiality is one of those concepts that is easy to praise in mission statements and easy to neglect in everyday academic life. Yet for most of us, the quality of our working relationships profoundly shapes how sustainable, humane, and intellectually rewarding our careers feel. Academia is often imagined as a solitary pursuit, but in practice it is deeply social: ideas are refined through conversation, careers unfold through networks, and well-being depends on everyday interactions. Collegiality is not a soft extra; it is the infrastructure that allows scholarly work to happen at all.

This becomes clearer when read through the lens of Richard Sennett’s book The Corrosion of Character. Sennett describes how contemporary forms of work, shaped by flexibility, competition, and short-termism, erode long-term commitments and shared moral frameworks. Although he does not write specifically about universities, his analysis resonates strongly with academic life. When careers are fragmented into short contracts and performance metrics, it becomes harder to invest in relationships that extend beyond immediate utility. Collegiality, which depends on trust, continuity, and mutual recognition, struggles to survive in environments where everyone is encouraged to remain strategically mobile.

This tension is explored in detail in Tactical evaluations: Everyday neoliberalism in academia by Fabian Cannizzo. Cannizzo shows how evaluation practices—rankings, audits, performance reviews—are not just imposed from above but enacted daily by academics themselves. People learn to behave tactically: choosing collaborations for their CV value, weighing whether helping a colleague “pays off,” and quietly competing with those they also depend on. Collegiality does not disappear, but it becomes conditional and strategic. Acts of generosity are increasingly framed as risks rather than norms.

For early career researchers and PhD candidates, this can be particularly destabilising. You may feel pressure to be collegial—supportive, cooperative, generous—while also being constantly evaluated as an individual performer. The result is often emotional dissonance: wanting to belong to an intellectual community while being rewarded for standing out from it. Over time, this corrodes not only collegial relations but also one’s sense of academic identity and purpose.

The conclusion is not that collegiality is naïve or obsolete. On the contrary, it is precisely under neoliberal conditions that collegiality becomes an ethical practice. Choosing to share credit, mentor generously, or offer informal support is a way of resisting the reduction of academic life to metrics alone. Collegiality does not mean ignoring power or pretending competition does not exist. It means recognising that universities function best when people treat each other as colleagues rather than rivals.

In a system that often corrodes character, collegiality remains one of the ways to actively rebuild it; one interaction at a time.